Exchange 2010 SP2 Prerequisites

To upgrade Exchange 2010 SP1 to SP2 requires the addition of an additional Windows server role that was not listed on the RTM and SP1 requirements.

Therefore if you try an upgrade you will get errors about “IIS 6 WMI Compatibility” not being installed.

To install this feature quickly on Windows Server 2008 R2, bring up PowerShell and enter the following commands:

Import-Module ServerManager
Add-WindowsFeature Web-WMI

You can then proceed with the SP2 installation. This role feature is required for Mailbox and CAS roles and specifically for the new OWA Mini feature that Service Pack 2 introduces.

If you are running Exchange 2010 on Windows 2008 (not the R2 version) then the above PowerShell command does not work. Instead you need to install the prerequisites with the following (from an administrative command prompt):

ServerManagerCmd -install Web-WMI

But is this really the only new prerequisite? If you take a look in the exchange-typical.xml file found in the service pack download (in the scripts folder) then you will see a long list of prerequisites, and more than just Web-WMI is new since Service Pack 1. The full list of prerequisites are:

But are they all needed? Only having Web-WMI missing from an SP1 install stops the service pack from being installed, but I suppose that for your own sanity you would install all the prerequisites even if they appear not to be!

Therefore if you run Windows 2008 R2 it is best to run (from PowerShell):

@Anon, just run the command above again. SP2 is a full install of Exchange as well as the service pack. There is no need to install Exchange + SP’s. On a new machine install the SP2 download. If Rollup Updates have been released for the product then drop the latest of these that you are using into the Updates folder (when you extract the SP to a folder, this subfolder will appear). Any Rollup Updates in the Updates folder will be installed during the Exchange install process.

Of course, if you are reinstalling it in the case of a server recovery then its not the same command – check the help docs for the full syntax for doing a server recovery (but again, you would recover the server with the same version it was last installed to – so you would do a recovery from the SP2 download if it was this server that you were rebuilding).